Emerging media from the borderlands of Jewish identity

Intimacy or Strain

Leonard, his mother Aga, Susi and Andy and Steve (my dad and uncle)—the day Leonard's parents arrived in America.

Although my father had told me of my grandpa’s affairs, it never set in. As my dad talked of Leonard’s womanizing ways, I wondered about the extent; and I believed it safe to trust my grandfather in basic loyalty to his wife. But recently my dad very casually brought up the somewhat familiar story of my grandmother Susi’s reaction to Leonard’s affair—she had climbed onto the roof of his mistress’s car and in front of her peed on it. That had obviously dominated the larger story, since now I was quite startled and disappointed to hear of his infidelities. The woman with the car had been his secretary. And now as I write this and ask my father to recount the story, I am informed his affairs were not limited to her. I’m not sure what to make of this information.

When Susi and Leonard were alive together and I was small, I don’t remember intimacy or strain. I suppose at that point they had lived for so long together that their problems were, to a degree, washed out in the background.

Taking Leonard’s rascally ways into consideration, I have never come to the realization that he is related to me. During

the opening of The Cannery, Leonard enjoyed press and celebrity, a diplomatic hambone and entertainer. He was a character and very rarely timid, even in his own creation of shocking situations: yelling at waiters, pushing aside (in a tipsy state) old folk waiting for a cab, opening champagne so the cork nearly skimmed an ear in its flight across the room. That part of him must have come across in my father, and me too, in some way. In my father I see traces of Leonard—at times a mischief-maker with a fiery temper—though his general personality follows that of Susi’s: floating and modest. But it seems my grandfather also gave him his idealism and hyper-sensitivity. Leonard’s uncle, Peter, was almost pathologically shy and self-conscious—Russian traits, so my dad says. My father says I have “barbarian” on both sides of my family: from Leonard and from my mother’s Mongol father.

HALF-REMEMBERED STORIES

In July 2010, we will be rolling out a multi-media exhibition about lost people, lost places, and the quest to reclaim lost memory. In preparation for this exhibit, we've invited 16 young Jews, ages 15 to 25, to blog.